If Hell is Digital?
by Backdraft
Summary: A OneShot crossover, logging Dante's thoughts into a world far too real to accept for some, but to live in the truth is comforting to others. Rated for mild language.


_Author's Note: Devil May, its characters are owned by Capcom. All other characters owned by their respected companies._

_This is based on an old idea that I finally had the time to write out. It's rushed, but it's something for a one-shot.  
_

_Sparda…Eva…Vergil…Trish…everyone…it was all a dream. _

I was warned that it'd be like this. All these doubts and thoughts of what I had believed for so long, how the memories of my old life would set in mind. All the demons I killed, all the people I saved, now it all seems like a long, looming lie, and I have to start my life…if you can call it a life…all over again. I'm surrounded by endless darkness, which I should be used to considering where I had come from, but this isn't the darkness I fought within white heat. This darkness is cold and metallic, plastered with the memories of the dead, their screams still reverberating along its walls. People like me, freed from the clutch of a world close to our own, but nowhere near as believable anymore.

I don't even know what day it is, much less the year, yet the guy that saved me said that we were close to the year 3000, or something like that. His name was Cable, but his old, "human" name was Scott Summers, like it matters now. He came to my office with this long story about what's real and what's not, and that I wasn't supposed to have lasted as long as I have. He called me a "glitch", like I was some computer problem. I didn't wanna' believe 'em, that all I did was just a fabrication of something that had humanity in its grasp for years. Then, after awakening in that thick red slime, disconnecting myself from the wires and technology that may have been my life force, I slid into a cesspool, nearly drowning while thinking "Fuck, he was right." That's when they saved me. Days later, I woke up, and was told just part of the story, before I got familiar with the crew.

Some were like me, people freed from the false world we called home. First was the second-in-command, a brunette named Heart, taken from her old name, Jill Valentine. She claimed to be some cop in the midst of investigating a cooperation's scheme peddling a virus that mutated people. I think I remember a story like that from back then. Anyway, second was Raiden, the youngest on the ship, who, despite his age, said he was some sort of special agent working with a legendary person in his class. _Pliskin_, something…

Next were the twins, Mad Dog and Scorpion. They were once soldiers fighting off some alien threat on a remote island. To me, that alone sounded like an eighties video game with a rushed plot, considering the eighties may have been more than a few centuries ago by now. Then you had Scythe, who had the most interesting of the crew's backgrounds. He was apparently a man cursed with eternal life, and after numerous failures of bringing two magic swords together to rid him of the curse, he had prepared to give up, all while those that surrounded him spread throughout the world searching for fragments of one of the two swords. That's when he was "tricked" into believing that he had found a surefire way to rid himself of the curse, to become mortal again. In a twisted, fucked up way, he got his wish.

Finally, there was the captain. Whenever he spoke, everyone listened to his deep voice as if they were in a trance. With white hair like my own, only longer, he gave off an energy that seemed to transfer from wherever he came from, which he never dared to speak about, except to himself in his dreams. Some nights, we could all hear him screaming something about a cloud, a meteor, and even one word I couldn't make out, yet sounded like "Jenova." Don't know what it means, and I'll be damned to ask. All I know is that despite him being the ship's captain, how is he supposed to lead these people into this cybernetic hell, when he's still haunted by his own?

As for me, well, it seems I'm faced with the same problem I had in my old life. I couldn't come up with a name to my business for a while, so now I'm stuck with finding a name for myself. Nothing wrong with _Dante_, but I guess it's just me wanting to be cool and have something like Scythe, or like one of their late members, Magneto. All I know is this…it would seem that even with a new venue, and new weapons, and heightened sense of mortality, I'm still who I was before, only now the demons are machines. Squid-like, yes, but anything that wants humanity dead can get killed all the same. Who knows? I might do my part in saving us all, but that's thinking too big of myself too soon.

Sometimes, though, I wonder why they saved me? "Tommy boy" would've loved this. Big on computers, hacking, an' everything, unlike the old me, but now I have no choice. Not that I'm knocking fate, but if anybody needed to be saved, he'd be the one.

_Thanks for reading :) _


End file.
